Countercontrols for the american educational research association.
ABA needs organized counter-controls to win funding and teacher-training influence back from the education establishment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Greer (1982) wrote a position paper. It told ABA to fight back against the American Educational Research Association.
The paper said AERA controlled teacher training and research money. ABA needed committees to steer funds and certify teachers.
No data were collected. The piece laid out a battle plan for institutional counter-control.
What they found
The author argued ABA would stay sidelined unless it built power structures to match AERA.
Counter-control meant ABA forms its own funding panels, certification boards, and student-recruit pipelines.
How this fits with other research
Delprato (2002) and Spencer et al. (2022) kept the term counter-control but shrunk the lens. They moved the idea from boardrooms to clinic rooms. Now counter-control is part of a everyday functional analysis when clients dodge our control attempts.
Napolitano et al. (2025) widened the lens again. They agree ABA must shape external systems, but push past funding boards into full-scale policy careers for BCBAs.
Joyce et al. (1988) is the bridge. Published six years after the target, it also told analysts to give lawmakers data-driven briefs, echoing the call to counter-control education policy.
Why it matters
If you want ABA to have a seat at the table, organize. Join your state ABA advocacy committee, volunteer to review grant panels, or add a public-policy rotation to your trainee program. Small collective moves today keep the field from being boxed out tomorrow.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Publications of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) maintain that years of research in education have failed to produce a useful technology for teachers. Little is said to be known about teaching children beyond the potential of new findings such as mastery learning, time on task, and features of an appropriate school climate. These latter conclusions are in stark contrast to the large body of useful findings in the behavior analysis literature. Several possible reasons are discussed for the discrepancy in views between behavior analysts and educational researchers. The lack of acknowledgement of behavior analysis is viewed as a serious problem because of the control that the educational research establishment exerts over federal funding of research and the training of teachers. There is a growing use of some of the aspects of behavior analysis by educational researchers; however, the derivation is not acknowledged and there is little enlightenment about radical behaviorism. It is suggested that ABA should countercontrol the influence of AERA by incorporating doctoral students in educational research as students of behavior analysis, teaching the complexity of behaviorism, teaching the positions of the opposing camp to behavior analysis students. ABA can take an aggressive role in countercontrolling AERA by forming committees to insure (a) quality of treatment, (b) funding representation in government, (c) protection and qualified review of untenured behavior analysts, (d) expansion of certification.
The Behavior analyst, 1982 · doi:10.1007/BF03393141